Month: March 2016

Anyone who has ever ‘owned’ land in Second Life has probably experienced a terraforming accident at some time or another. You know how it is. You want to raise or lower your land, do something clumsy, and find yourself either living on a very tall mountain, or at the bottom of the sea.

This morning it happened to me. The entire sim went under water.

And I have no idea why.

I would love to show you some pictures of Furillen-under-the-sea, but I was too busy panicking to worry about taking pictures.

With the help of my good friend Dooozy, it took around an hour to get the land looking as it should. However, because I am on a less than fast connection and experiencing lag, I can’t fine tune the land until the weekend. So if you see things floating, or see water where it shouldn’t be, please let me know as gently as you can …

And yes, I do realise that I can ask Linden Labs to do a roll back. But we all know what that would mean.

I got into this mess because I was removing the last remnants of Furillen’s ferry terminal. Yes. The ship has gone, along with the intriguing – and slightly spooky – terminal building.

There have been some wonderful pictures of this part of the sim. But it was never a permanent fixture. As I explained in a previous blog post, I put the boat there because I won it in a hunt, and liked it.

The Ferris Wheel will go too, in due course, as will the hot air balloon.

As I’ve said many times, I don’t think a sim should be set in stone, frozen in time. Furillen has changed as its visitors change, as the seasons change, and as I change.

And so begins another chapter in the life of a sim that has never stopped surprising me. Like much else that has happened at Furillen, this is a collaborative effort, and I have no idea where it will lead … or whether the place will get hit by another flash flood.

e.e.cummings

I wanted to draw attention to three videos that were made recently at Furillen. As can be seen here, the sim has featured in some really well-made videos, and it’s a pleasure to add these three to the list.

All were made during recent music events at the sim. The first is by Tizzy Canucci, and serves as a great reminder of the installation she made for our Radiohead weekend.

The second is by Dooozy, and this captures the sights and sounds of our recent disco night.

While some of Furillen’s structures – such as the Ferris wheel – are temporary and obviously whimsical, the structure that occupies this part of the sim should not be.

I wasn’t satisfied with the previous structures because although they looked good enough in that nostalgia-kitsch style that is (alas) so fashionable on the grid …

… they made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Whereas the radio tower does. Indeed, there is a history of structures like this at Furillen.

The first radio tower was placed on Gotland in 1952, shortly after the so-called Catalina Affair, in which Soviet Jets shot down two Swedish planes over the Baltic Sea. Those planes had allegedly been intelligence gathering (predictably, the Swedish government denied this).

The radar installation – now labelled an ‘early warning’ system, of course – was first built on Furillen itself during 1953-4.

The station subsequently employed up to ten military personnel, four radar observers, and a series of guard dogs, including a German Shepherd called Hit and a Rottweiler called Boy.

The structure changed shape as the technology improved. Inevitably, pictures of such a sensitive piece of kit are not exactly in plentiful supply, but the images I have found so far suggest that it is not outlandish for us to imagine that the structure I have placed on the sim – taken from an existing build by KT Syakumi – once existed on the real Furillen …